“I’ll leave my phone on,” Caroline said, experiencing an all-too-familiar spasm of guilt in her gut. She took another look in the mirror and tried to recapture her earlier elation, the feel of Arthur’s fingers gently caressing her flesh, the wetness of his tongue as it glided across her bare skin before disappearing between her legs, the expert way he’d brought her to climax even before he entered her.
“Everything all right at home?” he asked when she returned to the bedroom. He was lying naked in the king-size bed, the once crisp white sheets bunched around his torso.
Caroline turned off her phone, tossed it on top of the puddle of clothes on the floor, and slid in beside him. “Everything’s fine,” she said.
“What’s the matter?” Peggy asked, opening the door to her sprawling bungalow in the quiet, somewhere-between-artsy-and-rundown district of Hillcrest.
“Can I come in?” Caroline asked from the doorstep.
Peggy stood back to allow her entry.
“Who is it?” Fletcher called from somewhere inside the house.
“It’s Caroline,” Peggy called back. “What happened? You look terrible. Are you sick?”
“It’s been quite a day.” Caroline followed Peggy into the living room, sitting down on the comfortable brown sofa across from a couple of mismatched chairs, one a grayish tweed, the other a pink and blue floral print. The walls were yellow, the carpet navy, the coffee table some sort of distressed wood. Nothing belonged together, yet curiously, everything worked. Much like the marriage of Peggy and Fletcher, the only couple from that ill-fated trip to Rosarito whose relationship was still intact.
“What’s going on?”
“I saw Jerrod Bolton this morning.”
“Jerrod Bolton? As in Jerrod and Rain?”
“He called me, asked me to meet him. Did you know Rain and Hunter were having an affair?”
“What? When?”
Fletcher walked into the living room, looking surprisingly put together for a relaxing Sunday afternoon in tailored black dress pants and a blue-and-white-striped shirt. “Hi, Caroline. I didn’t know you were dropping by.”
“Hunter and Rain have been having an affair,” his wife told him.
“What?”
“Fifteen years ago,” Caroline qualified. “They were sleeping together while we were in Mexico.”
“I thought Hunter didn’t even like Rain,” Fletcher said.
“And Jerrod just called you out of the blue to tell you this?” Peggy asked.
“Apparently Rain confessed that she and Hunter not only had an affair, but had been sleeping together when we were all in Rosarito, right under our noses. He said he’s been debating with himself for months about whether or not to tell me. Then with all the recent publicity about it being the fifteenth anniversary…You honestly had no idea?”
Peggy and Fletcher shook their heads in unison, the shocked expressions on their faces convincing Caroline that they were telling the truth.
“I’m not sure I understand the point of telling you this now,” Fletcher said. “It happened so long ago, you and Hunter have been divorced for years…”
“They were together the night Samantha disappeared.”
“What?” said Peggy.
“What?” echoed Fletcher.
“Our anniversary dinner?” Caroline asked, as if she still couldn’t quite believe it. “When she went to get a sweater and he was supposedly checking on the kids?”
“They were together?” Peggy said, repeating the question in Caroline’s voice.
“He didn’t check the kids,” Caroline said. “Which means nobody looked in on them for more than an hour.”
There was a long pause.
“So Samantha could have been taken up to half an hour earlier than anyone considered,” Peggy said.
“Are you sure about this?” Fletcher asked. “Maybe you should talk to Hunter.”
“I just came from Hunter’s. He confirmed it.”
“Shit,” said Fletcher, lowering himself into the pink and blue floral chair.
“Shit,” said Peggy, mimicking her husband as she sank into the grayish tweed.
They remained that way, three points on an invisible triangle, for several minutes. Caroline stared at her friend’s kind face and, for the first time, realized that Peggy was wearing eye makeup, that her hair was freshly washed and curled, and that she was wearing the turquoise silk dress she reserved for special occasions. “Oh, my God. You were getting ready to go out.”
“We have a wedding,” Fletcher said, almost apologetically.
“I’m so sorry.” Caroline jumped to her feet, ran to the front door.
“Caroline, wait,” Peggy said, running after her. “We still have time…”
“No,” Caroline told her. “It’s a wedding. You can’t be late. It’s bad luck.”
“You just made that up.”